Gramscian Politics and Capitalist Common Sense

Abstract

“Gramsci” is a name that has been used for a long time by a lot of people to authorize political attention to cultural practices, as against many different versions of economism that would seem to ignore fields of culture altogether. Some of that borrowed authority is of course legitimate enough; Gramsci’s writings do involve lengthy critiques of economism. But some of it is far-fetched indeed, since I think it’s rather difficult to read much of the Notebooks while trying to sustain the idea that economics was only a secondary interest or concern for Gramsci. The existing imbalance of attention, however, means that much interpretive work still remains to be done on Gramsci’s texts. We need to follow up early and pioneering essays that pointed out the importance of economics for Gramsci and the importance of what Gramsci had to say about economics. We need to understand better how Gramsci understood the ensemble of relations linking economic and cultural practices in specific historical moments. Some of that work is now being done, and I certainly don’t want to deny its force and value by trying to sidestep for the moment the interpretive dilemmas it raises. My more limited immediate interest, however, involves thinking about economics and economic issues in the context of a far more typically studied and commented on series of passages in the Notebooks regarding “common sense.” These passages have assumed a great deal of importance for a number of different reasons. In some of the early and heavily ethnographic work produced at the Birmingham Center, for example, Gramsci’s remarks provided a rationale for taking seriously how people